Epic Budgeting, or how Agile teams meet deadlines
According to this year’s State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Recently at ProductCamp Vancouver 2017 I ran a workshop where I introduced Epic Budgeting, a practice that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing the scope of every epic individually. Instead of scope creep or an unsustainable focus on delivering the perfect feature dragging a team off course, epic budgeting allows product owners to manage delivered work to the capacity of the team. During this session we learned about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown.
You can download here the slides from the talk: Epic Budgeting by Dave Sharrock
I am excited to be presenting an expanded version of the talk at the Calgary Agile Methods User Group meetup on Thursday, May 4. And I’m at least 53% certain we will finish on time!